GermaniaIII

Germania III
Ancient Germanic History

PART TWO

Ancient history of the German peoples

The German peoples are defined by the common language group to which they
belong. German history thus originates with the so-called first sound shift (or
Grimm's law), which turned a Proto-Indo-European dialect into a new Germanic
language group. The Proto-Indo-European consonants p, t, and k became the
Proto-Germanic f, þ (th), and x (h), and the Proto-Indo-European b, d, and g became
Proto-Germanic p, t, and k. The historical context of the shift is difficult to identify
because it is impossible to date it conclusively. Clearly the people who came to
speak Germanic must have been isolated from other Indo-Europeans for some time,
but it is not obvious which archaeological culture might represent the period of the
shift. One possibility is the so-called Northern Bronze Age, centred in northern
Germany and Scandinavia, that flourished between about 1700 and 450 BC.
Alternatives would be one of the early Iron Age cultures of the same region (e.g.,
Wessenstadt [800-600 BC], or Jastorf [600-300 BC]).

Solid historical information begins in about 50 BC when Julius Caesar'sGallic Wars
brought him into contact with Germans as well as Celts. He did cross the Rhine in 55
and 53 BC, but the province of Gaul he created used the river as a boundary and
most Germans lived beyond it. Direct Roman attacks on German tribes began again
under Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus, who pushed across the Rhine in 12-9 BC,
while other Roman forces assaulted Germanic tribes through the middle Danube (in
modern Austria and Hungary). Fierce fighting in both areas, and the famous victory
of the German Arminius in the Teutoburger Forest in AD 9 (when three Roman
legions were massacred), showed that conquering these tribes would require too
much effort. The Roman frontier thus stabilized on the Rhine and Danube rivers,
although sporadic campaigns (notably under Domitian in AD 83 and 88) extended
control over Frisia in the north and some lands east of the confluence of the Rhine
and the Danube.

Both archaeology and Caesar's own account of his wars show that German tribes
then lived on both sides of the Rhine. The Romans also met Germans on the middle
Danube. In fact, broadly similar archaeological cultures from this period stretch
across central Europe from the Rhine to the Vistula River (in modern Poland), so
that Germanic peoples probably dominated all of these areas. Germanic cultures
extended from Scandinavia as far south as the Carpathians. These Germans led a
largely settled agricultural existence. They practiced mixed farming, lived in wooden
houses (working mainly in wood), did not have the potter's wheel, were nonliterate,
and did not use money. The marshy lowlands of northern Europe preserve
otherwise perishable wooden objects, leather goods, and clothing and shed much
light on the Germanic way of life. These bogs were also used for ritual sacrifice and
execution, and some 700 "bog people" have been recovered. Their remains are so
well preserved that even dietary patterns can be established; the staple was a gruel
made of many kinds of seeds and weeds.

Clear evidence of social differentiation appears in these cultures. Richly furnished
burials (containing rich jewelry and sometimes weapons) have been uncovered in
many areas, showing that a wealthy warrior-prince class was developing. These
chiefs became a standard feature of Germanic society, and archaeologists have
uncovered the halls where they feasted their retainers, an activity described in the
Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. This warrior elite followed the cult of a war god (Tiu or
Wodan). Tacitus describes in the Germania how in AD 59 the Hermunduri, in
fulfillment of their vows, sacrificed defeated Chatti to this god. This elite was also
the basis of political organization. The Germans were divided into numerous tribes,
which were also united in leagues centred on the worship of particular cults. These
cults were probably created by one locally dominant tribe and changed over time.
Tribes belonging to such leagues came together for an annual festival, when
weapons were laid aside. Apart from worship, these were also times for economic
activity, social interaction, and settling disputes.

The following pages are references to the continuous methodical record of Ancient
Germany.

Merovingians and Carolingians

When the western Roman Empire ended in 476, the Germanic tribes west of the
Rhine were not politically united. The west Germanic tribes, however, spoke dialects
of a common language and shared social and political traditions. The traditions of
these tribes had been influenced by centuries of contact with the Roman world,
both as federated troops within the empire and as participants in the broader
political and economic network that extended beyond the Roman frontier. In
particular a strongly military structure of social organization, under the direction of
commanders termed kings or dukes, had developed among the federated tribes
within the empire and spread to tribes living outside the empire proper. Likewise,
the Ostrogothic kings in Italy extended their influence over much of the Germanic
world north of the Alps.

Merovingian Germany

The Franks, settled in Romanized Gaul and western Germany, rejected Ostrogothic
leadership and began to expand their kingdom eastward. Clovis' conversion to
orthodox Christianity was an overt challenge to Ostrogothic hegemony to the east
and to Visigothic control to the south. He and his successors, particularly
Theodebert I (reigned 534-548), brought much of what would later constitute
Germany under Frankish control, including the Thuringians of central Germany and
the Alemanni and Bavarians of the south. Generally these heterogenous groups
were given a law code including Frankish and local traditions and were governed by
a duke of mixed Frankish and indigenous background who represented the
Frankish king. In times of strong central leadership, as under Dagobert I (629-639),
this leadership could have real effect. At other times, when the Frankish realm was
badly divided or embroiled in civil wars, local dukes enjoyed great autonomy. This
was particularly true of the Bavarian Agilolfings, who were closely related to the
Lombard royal family of Italy and who by the 8th century enjoyed virtual royal status.
In the north the Frisians and Saxons remained independent of Frankish control into
the 8th century, preserving their own political and social structures and remaining
for the most part pagan. In areas under Frankish lordship, Christianity made
considerable progress through the efforts of native Raetians in the Alpine regions,
of wandering Irish missionaries, and of transplanted Frankish aristocrats who
supported monastic foundations.

The rise of the Carolingians and Boniface

By the end of the 7th century, Merovingian rule throughout the Frankish world had
been destroyed by powerful, competing aristocratic clans, each claiming autonomy
and hoping to establish hegemony over the Frankish realm. The clan that finally
succeeded was the Carolingian, which drew its strength from extensive estates and
loyal aristocratic supporters in the lands between the Meuse and the Rhine. The
Carolingians ruled the kingdom from the 730s, although they did not acquire the
royal title until 751. They consolidated effective control over the Frankish heartland
and the duchies east of the Rhine. Consolidating control over these duchies was
facilitated by supporting the missionary activities of churchmen closely allied with
Roman hierarchical forms of ecclesiastical organization that favoured political
centralization, at the expense of indigenous and Irish ecclesiastical structures. The
pattern of Frankish penetration was always the same. Small communities or
churches were settled on land newly won from forest or marsh, granted them by
their Carolingian protectors. Thus, from Frisia in the north to Bavaria in the south,
religious, economic, and political penetration went hand in hand. A distinguished
part was played by Anglo-Saxon missionaries, who linked the Frankish world not only
with the high culture of the churches (notably York) from which they set out but also
with Rome, the ultimate source of their inspiration. Chief among them were St.
Willibrord (c. 658-739), who worked as a missionary and Frankish agent among the
Frisians and later the Thuringians, and St. Boniface (c. 675-754), who created a
German church structure. Supported by Charles Martel against both the aristocratic
Frankish clergy and the preexisting clergy of the Germanic regions, many of whom
feared growing Carolingian and Roman control, Boniface led missions into
Franconia, Thuringia, and Bavaria, where he founded or reorganized diocesan
organization on a Roman model. In 742 he played a large part in the first council of
the new German church. By the time of his death at the hands of northern Frisians,
all of the continental Germanic peoples except the Saxons were well on the way
toward integration into a Roman-Frankish ecclesiastical structure.

Charlemagne

Charlemagne built on the foundations laid by Charles Martel and Boniface.
Contemporary writers were vastly impressed by Charlemagne's political campaigns
to destroy the autonomy of Bavaria and his equally determined Saxon military
campaigns. Under their Agilolfing dukes, who had at times led the opposition to the
rising Carolingians, the Bavarians had developed an independent,
southward-looking state that had close contacts with Lombard Italy and peaceful
relations with the Avar kingdom to the east. Charlemagne's conquest of the
Lombards in 774 left Bavaria isolated, and in 788 Charlemagne succeeded in
deposing the last Agilolfing duke, Tassilo III, and replacing him with a trusted agent.
Thereafter, Charlemagne used Bavaria as the staging ground for a series of
successful wars that ultimately destroyed the Avar kingdom.

The subjugation of the north proved much more difficult than that of the south. In
the wake of the missionaries, Frankish counts and other officials moved into
northeastern Frisia, raising contingents for the royal host and doing the other
business of secular government. As for the Rhineland, the richer it grew the more
necessary it became to protect its hinterland, Franconia (Hesse) and Thuringia, from
Saxon raids. Because there was no natural barrier behind which to hold the Saxons,
this was a difficult task.

Unlike the Bavarians, the Saxons were not politically united. Their independent
edhelingi (nobles) lived on estates among forest clearings, dominating the frilingi
(freemen), lazzi (half-free), and unfree members of Saxon society and leading raids
into the rich Frankish world. Thus each of Charlemagne's punitive expeditions bit
deeper into the heart of Saxony, leaving behind bitter memories of forced
conversions, deportations, and massacres. These raids were inspired by religious
as well as political zeal; Charlemagne tried to break Saxon resistance both to
Christianity and to Frankish dominance with fire and sword. Still, the decentralized
nature of Saxon society made ultimate conquest extremely difficult. Whenever the
Frankish army was occupied elsewhere, the Saxons could be counted on to revolt,
to slaughter Frankish officials and priests, and to raid as far westward as they could.
Charlemagne in turn would punish the offending tribes and garrison the defense
points abandoned by the Saxons. In time resistance to the Franks gave the Saxons a
kind of unity under the leadership of Widukind, who succeeded longer than any
other leader in holding together a majority of chieftains in armed resistance to the
Franks. Ultimately internal feuding led to the capitulation even of Widukind. He
surrendered, was baptized, and, like Tassilo, was imprisoned in a monastery for the
remainder of his life. Saxony had been savagely repressed, as is reflected in the
Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae (c. 785; "Capitulary for the Saxon Regions") and the
Capitulare Saxonicum (797; "Capitulary of the Saxons"), both measures intended to
force the submission of the Saxons to the Franks and to Christianity. Loyal Frankish
churchmen and aristocrats were introduced to secure and pacify the region.
Although northern regions that enjoyed Danish support remained outside of
Frankish control, most of Saxony gradually moved into the united Frankish realm.

The emergence of Germany

The kingdom of Louis the German

Charlemagne made no attempt to rule his vast empire in a unified manner and was
content to leave each Germanic region largely in the hands of his counts and
bishops. His son Louis I (Louis the Pious) was not unpopular with his Germanic
subjects; on two occasions he owed his restoration to power largely to their
support, but his primary focus was on the Romance-speaking regions of the empire.
In 825 he entrusted his son Louis the German (804-876) with the government of
Bavaria, whence he was gradually to extend his power over all of Carolingian
Germany. This was the first time that the German peoples had had a ruler whose
authority was confined to their own lands. Although his ambitions extended
throughout the whole Carolingian world, Louis cultivated German language and
literature for the first time as a self-conscious cultural and political identity. Under
his patronage the Gospels were translated into Germanic dialects and the first
attempts at writing Germanic poetry with Christian and traditional themes were
undertaken. Louis himself was described as the Frankish king of the eastern
kingdom. Much of Louis' reign was taken up with campaigns against neighbouring
Slavs, and this external focus maintained stability and royal authority over the
aristocracy. By 870 Louis' dominions reached almost the boundaries of medieval
Germany. On the east they were bordered by the Elbe and the Bohemian mountains;
on the west, beyond the Rhine, they included the districts afterward known as
Alsace and Lorraine. Ecclesiastically, they included the provinces of Mainz, Trier,
Cologne, Salzburg, and Bremen. Although the close kinship and rivalries of the
descendants of Charlemagne still united east and west Francia, the eastern region
was taking on the identity of Germany and the west was emerging as France.

Louis' long reign had accustomed the Germanic peoples of his kingdom to a certain
unity. After his death the kingdom was divided among his three sons in keeping with
Carolingian tradition, but the deaths of two of them, in 880 and 882, restored its unity
under Charles the Fat. The ceaseless external blows from Danes, Saracens, and
Magyars that fell upon the Carolingian world in the later 9th and 10th centuries
weakened the kingdom's cohesion, however. Not only the Carolingians themselves
but also their followers were prepared to take advantage of one another, to
compromise with the enemy, and to carve out even more dominions from one
another's lands. Incompetence in mounting effective resistance to invaders led to
revolts and civil wars, as for instance in 887 when Arnulf, an illegitimate son of Louis
the German's son Carloman, led an army of Bavarians in a successful revolt against
his uncle, Charles the Fat. Arnulf, however, was not equally successful in defending
his eastern possessions. After his death in 899, the German kingdom came under
the nominal rule of his young son, Louis the Child, and in the absence of strong
military leadership it became the prey of the Magyar horsemen and other invaders
from the east.

Rise of the duchies

Because the Carolingians themselves were unable to provide effective defense for
the whole kingdom, military command and the political and economic power
necessary to support it necessarily devolved on local leaders whose regions were
attacked. The inevitable result was the decentralization and decay of royal authority
to the profit of the regional dukes. Contrary to popular opinion, these dukes were
not appointed by the peoples concerned, nor were they descendants of the tribal
chieftains of the postmigration period. The so-called Stammesherzogtümer (stem or
tribal duchies) were new political and, ultimately, social units. Their dukes were
Carolingian counts, part of the international "imperial aristocracy" of the
Carolingians, who took the initiative in organizing defense on a local basis, without
thereby seeking to shake men's loyalty to the Carolingians. All the same, their initial
success established them in the hearts of those whom they protected. In Saxony the
Liudolfings, descendants of military commanders first established by Louis the
German, achieved spectacular successes against the Slavs, Normans, and Magyars.
In Franconia the Konradings rose to prominence over this largely Frankish region
with the assistance of Arnulf but became largely independent during the minority of
his son. Thuringia fell increasingly under the protection and lordship of the
Liudolfings. In Swabia (Alemannia) the Hunfridinger and Erchanger clans, originally
established by Carolingian kings, disputed control with each other and with regional
ecclesiastical lords. Similarly the Luitpoldingers, originally named as Carolingian
commanders, became dukes of Bavaria. Throughout the kingdom the only force for
preserving unity remained the church, but the threat of external foes led to the
secularization of much monastic land with episcopal approval, further strengthening
the power of the dukes.

The structural transformation of the "imperial aristocracy" to a local elite was
accompanied by an increasingly particularist, dynastically oriented aristocratic
society that was bound together through ties of vassalage and exercised personal
lordship over the free and half-free populations of the regions. This process did not
advance as far in Germany as it did in France. Everywhere German society remained
closer to older, regional varieties of social organization as well as to traditions of
Carolingian ecclesiastical and comital government.

Germany from 911 to 1250

When in 911 Louis the Child, last of the East Frankish Carolingians, died without
leaving a male heir, it seemed quite possible that his kingdom would break into
pieces. In at least three of the four stem lands, Bavaria, Saxony, and Franconia, the
ducal families were established in the leadership of their tribes; in Swabia
(Alemannia) two houses were still fighting for hegemony. Only the church, fearing
for its endowments, had an obvious interest in the future of the monarchy, its
ancient protector. Against the growing authority of the dukes and the deep
differences in dialect, in customs, and in social structure between the tribes there
stood only the Carolingian tradition of kingship; but, with Charles the Simple as
holder of the West Frankish kingdom, its future was uncertain and not very hopeful.
Only the Lotharingians put their faith in the ancient line and did homage to Charles,
its sole reigning representative. The other component parts of the East Frankish
kingdom did not follow suit.

One can only guess at the motives of the Saxon and Frankish tribal hosts who on
Nov. 10, 911, elected Conrad, duke of the Franks, as their king at Forchheim in
Franconia. At the opening of the 10th century the Germanic peoples in the lands
east of the Rhine and west of the Elbe, the Saale, and the Bohemian forest--as
rudimentary and as thinly spread as their settlements were--had to face even more
primitive and pagan races pressing in from farther east, especially the Magyars. The
Saxons, headed by their duke Otto of the house of the Liudolfings, were threatened
by more enemies on their frontiers than any other tribe; Danes, Slavs, and Magyars
simultaneously harassed their homeland. A king who commanded resources farther
west, in Franconia, might therefore prove to be of help to Saxony. The Rhenish
Franks, on the other hand, did not wish to abdicate from their position as the
leading and kingmaking people, which gave them many material advantages.

Conrad of Franconia, elected by Franks and Saxons, was soon recognized also by
Arnulf, duke of Bavaria, and by the Swabian clans. In descent, honours, and wealth,
however, Conrad was no more than the equal of the dukes who had accepted him as
king. To gain a lead over them, to found a new royal house, and to acquire those
wonder-working attributes that the Germans venerated in their rulers long after
they had been converted to Christianity, he had yet to prove himself able, lucky, and
successful. In this period, political affairs became the monopoly of the German kings
and a few score families of great magnates. The reason for this concentration of
power was that, at the very foundation of the German kingdom, circumstances had
long favoured those men whom birth, wealth, and military success had raised well
above the ranks of the ordinary free members of their tribe. Their estates were
cultivated in the main by half-free peasants--slaves who had risen or freemen who
had sunk. The holdings of these dependents fell under the power of the lord to
whom they owed service and obedience. Already they were tied to the lands on
which they laboured and were dependent on their protectors for justice. For many
reasons ordinary freemen tended generally to lose their independence and had to
seek aid from their more fortunate and powerful neighbours; thus, they lost their
standing in the assemblies of their tribe. Everywhere, except in Friesland and parts
of Saxony, the nobles wedged themselves between king or duke and the rank and
file. They alone could become prelates of the church, and they alone could compete
for the possession and enjoyment of governmental rights. At the level below the
dukes, the bulk of administrative authority, jurisdiction, and command in war lay with
the margraves and counts, whose hold on their charges developed gradually into
hereditary right. The commended men and the half free disappeared from the
important functions of public life. In the local assemblies they came only to pay dues
and to receive orders, justice, and penalties. Their political role was passive. Those
lords whose protection was most worth having also had the largest throng of
dependents and thus became more formidable to their enemies and to the
remaining freemen. Lordship and submission to it were hereditary, and thus the
horizon of the dependent classes narrowed until eventually the lord and his officials
filled the place of all secular authority and power in their lives. Military strength, the
possession of arms and horses, and tactical training in their use were decisive.
Most dependent men were disarmed; that became part of their degradation.

The accession of the Saxons

Conrad I was quite unequal to the situation in Germany. According to the beliefs of
contemporaries, his failure meant that his house was luckless and lacked the
prosperity-bringing virtues that belonged to true kingship. On his deathbed in 918,
he therefore proposed that the crown, which in 911 had remained with the Franks,
should now pass to the leading man in Saxony, the Liudolfing Henry (later called the
Fowler). Henry I was elected by the Saxons and Franks at Fritzlar, their ancient
meeting place, in 919. With a monarch of their own race, the Saxons now took over
the burden and the rewards of being the kingmaking people. The centre of gravity
shifted to eastern Saxony, where the Liudolfing lands lay.

The transition of the crown from the Franks to the Saxons for a time enhanced the
self-sufficiency of the south German tribes. The Swabians had kept away from the
Fritzlar election. The Bavarians believed that they had a better right to the
Carolingian inheritance than the Saxons (who had been remote outsiders in the 9th
century) and in 919 elected their own duke Arnulf as king. They, too, wanted to be
the royal and kingmaking people. Henry I's regime rested in the main on his own
position and family demesne in Saxony and on certain ancient royal seats in
Franconia. His kingship was purely military. He hoped to gather authority by waging
successful frontier wars and to gain recognition in the first place by concessions
rather than to insist on the sacred and priestlike status of the royal office that the
church had built up in the 9th century. At his election he refused to be anointed and
consecrated by the archbishop of Mainz. In settling with the Bavarians, he
abandoned the policy of supporting the internal opposition that the clergy offered to
Duke Arnulf, a plank to which Conrad had clung. To end Arnulf's rival kingship, Henry
formally surrendered to him the most characteristic privilege and honour of the
crown: the right to dispose of the region's bishoprics and abbeys. Arnulf's homage
and friendship entailed no positive obligations toward Henry, and the Bavarian duke
pursued his own tribal interests--peace with the Hungarians and expansion across
the Alps--as long as he lived.

From these unpromising beginnings the Saxon dynasty not only found its way back
to Carolingian traditions of government but soon got far better terms in its relations
with the autonomous powers of the duchies, which had gained such a start on it.
Nonetheless, the constitution that it bequeathed to its Salian successors was
self-contradictory; while seeking to overcome the princely aristocracies of the stem
lands by leaving them to themselves, the Saxon kings came to rely more and more,
both for the inspiration and for the practice of government, on the prelates of the
church, who were themselves recruited from the ranks of the same great families.
They loaded bishoprics and abbeys with endowments and privileges and thus
gradually turned the bishops and abbots into princes with interests not unlike those
of their lay kinsmen. These weaknesses, however, lay concealed behind the
personal ascendancy of an exceptionally tough and commanding set of rulers up to
the middle of the 11th century. Thereafter, the ambiguous system could not take the
strain of the changes fermenting within German society and even less the attack on
its values that came from without--from the reformed papacy.

The Liudolfing kings won military success, and with it they gained that respect for
their personal authority that counted for so much at a time when the great followed
only those whose star they trusted and who could reward services with the spoils of
victory. In 925 Henry I brought Lotharingia back to the East Frankish connection.
Whoever had authority in that half-French-speaking, half-German-speaking region
could treat the neighbouring kingdom of the West Franks as a dependent. The
young Saxon dynasty thus won for itself and its successors a hegemony over the
west and the southwest that lasted at least until the mid-11th century. The
Carolingian kings of France, as well as the great feudatories who sought to
dominate if not to ruin them, became, in turn, petitioners of the German court during
the reign of the Ottos. The kings of Burgundy--whose suzerainty lay over the valleys
of the Saône and the Rhône, the western Alps, and Provence--fell under the virtual
tutelage of the masters of Lotharingia. Rich in ancient towns, this region, once the
homeland of the Carolingians, was more thickly populated and wealthier than the
lands east of the Rhine. Lotharingian merchants controlled the slave trade from the
Saxon marches to Córdoba.

The eastern policy of the Saxons

Greater prestige still and a claim to imperial hegemony fell to the Saxon rulers when
they broke the impetus of the Hungarian invasions, against which the military
resources and methods of western European society had almost wholly failed for
several decades. In 933, after long preparations, Henry routed a Hungarian attack on
Saxony and Thuringia. In 955 Otto I (reigned 936-973), at the head of a force to which
nearly all the tribes had sent mounted contingents, annihilated a great Hungarian
army on the Lech River near Augsburg. The battle again vindicated the efficiency of
the heavily armed man skilled in fighting on horseback.

With a Saxon dynasty on the throne, Saxon nobles gained office and power, with
opportunities for conquest along the eastern river frontiers and marches of their
homeland. Otto I indeed had an eastern policy that aimed at getting more than
slaves, loot, and tribute. Between 955 and 972 he founded and richly endowed an
archbishopric at Magdeburg, which he intended to be the metropolis of a large
missionary province among the heathen Slavs beyond the Elbe. This would have
brought their tribes under German control and exploitation in the long run; but the
ruthless methods of the Saxon lay lords clashed with the church's efforts at more
peaceful penetration.

In the 10th century there was little or no German agricultural settlement beyond the
Elbe. Far too much forest clearing remained to be done in all the regions of western
and southern Germany. The Saxon conquests up to the Oder were secured by
military strongholds, called burgwards, and were held only as long as their garrisons
had the upper hand. Beyond the Slav peoples of Brandenburg and Lusatia,
moreover, new Slavic powers rose: the Poles under Mieszko I and, to the south, the
Czechs under the Premyslids received missionaries from Passau and Magdeburg
without falling permanently under the political and ecclesiastical domination of
Bavarians and Saxons. The heathen Elbe Slavs, subjugated by the Saxon margraves,
rose in 983 when the military occupation collapsed along with the missionary
bishoprics that had been founded at Oldenburg, Brandenburg, and Havelberg.
Farther south the defenses of the Thuringian marches between the Saale and the
middle Elbe remained in German hands, but only after a long and fierce struggle
against Polish invaders early in the 11th century. The northern part of the frontier
reverted to what it had been before Otto's trustees, Hermann Billung and Gero,
opened their wars. Missionary enterprises directed from Bremen and Magdeburg
achieved little before the 12th century. The Saxon ruling class, bishops, and
margraves must bear the responsibility for the fiasco of eastward expansion in the
10th century. The prelates, too, saw their missions as means to found ecclesiastical
empires with subject dioceses and tithes on Slav soil. The tribes across the Elbe
therefore remained unconverted and implacable foes, a standing menace to the
nearby churches. The wars also left a legacy of savagery on both sides so that from
about 1140 onward the substitution of German settlers for the native Slavs became
the common policy of both the church and the princes.

Dukes, counts, and advocates

Conrad I's and Henry I's kingships rested on the will of the tribes--or rather on that
of their leaders and of the higher aristocracy. It was in the first place an
arrangement between the Franks and the Saxons that the Bavarian and Swabian
dukes recognized at a price by acts of personal homage, but the German kings, of
whatever dynasty, had to live under Frankish law. After the death of Conrad I's
brother Eberhard in 939, Otto I kept the Franconian dukedom vacant and the
Franconian counts henceforth stood under the immediate authority of the crown. In
Saxony, too, Otto kept in his hands the dukedom of his ancestors. The march-duchy
of the Billungs, a bulwark raised against the Danes and the northern Slav tribes, did
not give the Billung family authority over all the other Saxon princes.

In the south the Ottonians sought to turn the dukedoms of the stem lands into royal
fiefdoms and to supplant native dynasties by aliens and members of their own clan.
When even that policy did not stop rebellions under the banner of tribal
self-interest, they began to break up the ancient Bavarian stem land by creating a
duchy in Carinthia to cut off the spearhead of Bavarian expansion southward. The
first two Salians, Conrad II (reigned 1024-39) and Henry III (reigned alone 1039-56),
also bestowed vacant duchies quite freely on their own kin and on men from outside
the stem boundaries. They competed against ducal power but could neither abolish
nor replace it. In the 11th century as before, the dukes held assemblies of their folk,
led the tribal host in war, and enforced peace.

The counts, who were the ordinary officers of justice in serious, criminal cases,
obeyed the ducal summons; but, for the most part, they received their "ban," the
power to do blood justice, from the king himself. The fiefs and the customary rights
attached to their office, and indeed the office itself, not only became hereditary but
also came to be treated more and more as a patrimony to which they had an inherent
right against all men, king and duke included. Even so, however, a good many lines
died out and their counties fell back into the king's hands. From Otto III's reign
(983-1002) onward, it became not at all unusual to bestow these counties on
bishoprics and certain great abbeys rather than to grant them out again to other lay
magnates. The bishops, however, could not perform all the functions of the counts;
in particular, their holy orders forbade them to pass judgments of blood. They often
subinfeudated their countships, and they needed officials called advocates (Vögte;
singular Vogt) to take charge of the higher jurisdiction in the franchises that their
churches possessed by royal grant. In the 10th and 11th centuries these advocates
had to be recruited from the aristocracy, the very class whose greed for hereditary
office was to be checked, because ordinary freemen could not enforce severe
sentences or defend the privileges of the church against armed intrusion.
Dangerous neighbours of bishoprics and abbeys in any case, the nobles as
advocates and protectors of ecclesiastical possessions were anything but reliable
servants of their ecclesiastical overlords.

Thus, there arose in nearly all German lands, whether the ducal office survived or
not, powerful lines of margraves, counts, and hereditary advocates who enriched
themselves at the expense of the church (which meant also the crown) and in
competition with one another. From the abler, more fortunate, and long-lived races
among these dynasts sprang the territorial princes of the later 12th and 13th
centuries, absorbing and finally inheriting most of the rights of government.

The king was the personal overlord of all the great. His court was the seat of
government, and it went with him on his long journeys. The German kings, even
more than other medieval rulers, could only make their authority respected in the
far-flung regions of their kingdom by traveling ceaselessly from duchy to duchy,
from frontier to frontier. Wherever they stayed, their jurisdiction superseded the
standing power of dukes, counts, and advocates, and they could collect the profits
of local justice and wield some control over it. As they came into each region, they
summoned its leaders to attend their solemn crown wearings, deliberated with them
on the affairs of the Reich and the locality, presided over pleas, granted privileges,
and made war against peacebreakers at home and on enemies abroad.

The promotion of the German church

The royal revenues came from the king's demesne lands and from his share of the
tributes that Poles, Czechs, heathen Slavs, and Danes paid whenever he could
enforce his claims of overlordship. There were also profits from tolls and mints that
had not yet been granted away. The king's demesne was his working capital. He and
his household lived on its produce during their wanderings through the Reich, and
it also served to provide for his family, to found churches, and to reward faithful
services done to him, especially in war. To swell the hosts, vassals had to be
enfeoffed, and alienations were inevitable. The Salians, though they inherited the
remains of Ottonian wealth as imperial demesne, brought little of their own to make
up for its diminution. The last Saxon, Henry II (1002-24), and after him Conrad II,
accordingly took to enfeoffing vassals with lands taken from the monasteries. Since
the beneficiaries were often already powerful and wealthy men in their own right, no
class of freeborn, mounted warriors linked permanently with the crown sprang from
the loyalties and rewards of one or two reigns. In any case, the lion's share of grants
went to the German church.

From the Carolingians, the German kings inherited their one and only institution of
central government: the royal chapel, with the chancery that does not seem to have
been distinct from it. Service there became a recognized avenue of promotion to
the episcopate for highborn clerks. In the 11th century, bishops and abbots
conducted the affairs of the Reich much more than the lay lords, even in war. They
were its habitual diplomats and ambassadors. Unlike Henry I, Otto I and his
successors sought to free the prelates from all forms of subjection to the dukes.
The king appointed most of them, and to him alone, as to one sent by God, they
owed obedience.

Thus, there arose beside the loose association of stem lands in the German
kingdom a more compact and uniform body with a far greater vested interest in the
Reich: the German church. By ancient Germanic custom, moreover, the founder of a
church did not lose his estate in the endowment that he had made; he remained its
proprietor and protecting lord. The bishoprics, it is true, and certain ancient abbeys,
such as Sankt Gallen, Reichenau, Fulda, and Hersfeld, did not belong to the king;
they were members of the kingdom but under his guardianship. The greater
churches therefore had to serve the rulers with mounted men, money, and free
quarters. Gifts of royal demesne to found or to enrich bishoprics and convents were
not really alienations but pious reinvestments, as long as the crown controlled the
appointments of bishops and abbots. The church did not merely receive grants of
land, often waste, to settle, develop, and make profitable; it was also given, as has
been shown, powers of jurisdiction over its dependents. Nor did the kings stint the
prelates in other regalian rights, such as mints, markets, and tolls. These grants
broke up counties and to some extent even duchies, and that was their purpose: to
disrupt the secular lords' jurisdictions that had escaped royal control.

This policy of fastening the church, a universal institution, into the Reich, with its
well-defined frontiers, is usually associated with the name of Otto I, but it gathered
momentum only in the reigns of his successors. The policy reached a climax under
Henry II, the founder of the see of Bamberg in the upper Main valley; nonetheless,
Conrad II, though less generous with his grants, and his son Henry III continued it.
Bishops and abbots became the competitors of lay princes in the formation of
territories, a rivalry that more than any other was the fuel and substance of the
ceaseless feuds, the smoldering internal wars in all the regions of Germany for
many centuries. The welter and the confused mosaic of the political map of Germany
until 1803 is the not-so-remote outcome of these 10th- and 11th-century grants and
of the incompatible ambitions that they aroused.

The Ottonian conquest of Italy and the imperial crown

Otto I's marriage with Adelaide (Adelheid), daughter of Rudolph II of Burgundy, and
the Italian rivalries between his son Liudolf, duke of Swabia, and Otto's brother
Henry I, duke of Bavaria, drew him southward. After 951, expeditions into Italy were a
matter for the whole Reich under the leadership of its ruler and no longer just an
outlet for the expansion of the south German tribes. For the Saxon military class,
too, the south was more tempting than the primeval forests and swamps beyond the
Elbe. With superior forces at their back, the German kings gained possession of the
Lombard kingdom in Italy. There, too, their overlordship in the 10th and the 11th
centuries came to rest on the bishoprics and a handful of great abbeys.

After his victory over the Magyars in 955, Otto I's hegemony in the west was
indisputable. By the standards of one chronicler, the Saxon Widukind, he had
already become emperor because he had subjected other peoples and enjoyed
authority in more than one kingdom. But the right to confer the imperial crown, to
raise a king to the higher rank of emperor, had fallen to the papacy, which had
crowned Charlemagne and most of his successors. The Carolingian order in the
west was still the model and something like a political ideal for all Western ruling
families in the 10th century. Otto had measured himself against the political tasks
that had faced his East Frankish predecessors and more or less mastered them. To
be like Charlemagne, therefore, and to clothe his newly won position in a traditional
and time-honoured dignity, he accepted the imperial crown and anointment from
Pope John XII in Rome in 962. The substance of his empire was military power and
success in war; but Christian and Roman ideas were woven round the Saxon's
throne by the writers of his own and the next generation. Although the German
kings as emperors did not give the law to the Roman church in matters of doctrine
and ritual, they became its political masters for nearly a century. The imperial crown
enhanced their standing even among the nobles and knights who followed them to
Italy and can hardly have understood or wanted all its outlandish associations. Not
only the king but also the German bishops and lay lords thus entered into a
permanent connection with an empire won on the way to Rome and bestowed by the
papacy.

Otto II (reigned alone 973-983) and above all Otto III (983-1002) were strongly drawn
toward their new Mediterranean sphere of action, but Henry II (1002-24) returned to
a sober regime centred on Germany and contented himself with three brief Italian
expeditions.

The Salians, the papacy, and the princes, 1024-1125

Under Conrad II (reigned 1024-39), the first member of the Rhine-Frankish house
known as the Salians, the kingdom of Burgundy fell finally under the overlordship of
the German crown, and this tough and formidable emperor also renewed German
authority in Italy. His son and successor, Henry III (reigned 1039-56), treated the
empire as a mission that imposed on him the tasks of reforming the papacy and of
preaching peace to his lay vassals. Without possessing any very significant new
resources of power, he gave to his authority an exalted and strained theocratic
complexion. Yet, under him, the last German ruler to maintain his hegemony in
western Europe, the popes themselves seemed to become mere imperial bishops.
He deposed three of them, and four Germans held the Holy See at his command; but
lay opposition to the emperor in Germany and criticism of his regime over the
church were on the increase during the last years of his reign.

The papal reforms and the German church

More than any other feudal society in early medieval Europe, Germany was divided
and torn by the revolutionary ideas and measures of the reformed papacy.
Beginning with the pontificate of Leo IX (1048-54)--one of Henry III's nominees--the
most determined and inspired spokesmen of ecclesiastical reform placed
themselves at the service of the Holy See. Only a few years after Henry III's death
(1056), they agitated against lay authority in the church, founded on proprietary
rights. They regarded the laity as passive partakers of the sacraments and denied
the supernatural status of kingship. Priests, including bishops and abbots, who
accepted their dignities from lay lords and emperors at a price, according to the
reformers, committed a sin; for these earthly powers could not rightly confer
churches at all, nor could they own them. They believed, moreover, that thorough
reforms could be brought about only by the exaltation of the papacy so that it
commanded the obedience of all provincial metropolitans and was out of the
emperor's and the local aristocracy's reach.

The endless repetition of the reformers' teachings in brilliant pamphlets and at
clerical synods spread agitation in Italy, Burgundy, and Lotharingia--all parts of the
empire. Their new program committed the leaders of the movement to a struggle for
power because it struck at the very roots of the regime to which the German church
had grown accustomed and on which the German kings relied. The vast wealth that
Henry IV's predecessors had showered on the bishoprics and abbeys would, if the
new teaching prevailed, escape his control and remain at the free disposal of
prelates whom he no longer appointed. Under Roman authority the churches were
to be freed from most of the burdens of royal protection without losing any of its
benefits. The most fiery spirits in Rome did not flinch from the consequences of
their convictions. Their leader Hildebrand, later Pope Gregory VII (reigned 1073-85),
was ready to risk a collision with the empire.

Henry IV was not yet six years old when his father died in 1056. The full impact of the
Gregorian demands--coming shortly after a royal minority, a Saxon rising, and a
conspiracy of the south German princes--has often been regarded as the most
disastrous moment in Germany's history during the Middle Ages. In fact, the German
church proved thoroughly unreliable as an inner bastion of the empire even before
Rome struck. Its leaders, Anno and Adalbert, archbishops of Cologne and of
Hamburg-Bremen respectively, shamelessly exploited their hold over the young
king by hunting for spoils out of the imperial demesne. In 1074 and 1075 Gregory
proceeded against simony (the buying and selling of church office) in Germany and
humiliated the aristocratic episcopate by summonses to Rome and sentences of
suspension. These papal actions demoralized and shook the German hierarchy. The
prelates' return to their customary support of the crown was not disinterested, nor
wholehearted, nor unanimous.

The discontent of the lay princes

Henry IV's minority also gave elbowroom to the ambitions and hatreds of the lay
magnates. The feeble regency of his mother, Agnes of Poitou, faltered before the
throng of princes, who respected only authority and forces greater than their own.
The ruling influence of the higher clergy at the court of Henry III and the renewed
flow of grants to the church had estranged them from the empire. It is likely also that
these eternally belligerent men were lagging behind the prelates in the
development of their agrarian resources. The prelates had a vested interest in
peace, and under royal protection they improved and enlarged their estates by
turning forests into arable land and also by offering better terms to freemen in
search of a lord. The bishops' market and toll privileges brought them revenues in
money, which many of the lay princes lacked. So far, however, the princes' military
power, their chief asset, had remained unchallenged. Now, for the first time, they
also had to face rivals within their own sphere of action. Henry III and the young
Henry IV began to rely on advisers and fighting men drawn from a lower tier of the
social order--the poorer, freeborn nobility of Swabia and, above all, the class of
unfree knights, known as ministeriales. These knights had first become important as
administrators and soldiers on the estates of the church early in the 11th century.
Their status and that of their fiefs was fixed by seignorial ordinances, and they could
be relied on and ordered about, unlike the free vassals of bishops and abbots.
Beginning with Conrad II, the Salian kings used ministeriales to administer their
demesne, as household officers at court and as garrisons for their castles. They
formed a small army, which the crown could mobilize without having to appeal to the
lay princes, whose ill will and antipathy toward the government of the Reich grew
apace with their exclusion from it.

Having come of age, Henry IV used petty south German nobles and his ministeriales
to recover some of the crown lands and rights, which the lay princes and certain
prelates had acquired during his minority, particularly in Saxony. His recovery
operations went further, however, and a great belt of lands from the northern
slopes of the Harz Mountains to the Thuringian Forest was secured and fortified
under the supervision of his knights to form a royal territory, where the king and his
court could reside. The south German magnates were thus kept at a distance when
Henry and his advisers struck at such neighbouring Saxon princes as Otto of
Northeim and the Billung family.

The storm broke in 1073. A group of Saxon nobles and prelates and the free
peasantry of Eastphalia, who had to bear the brunt of statute labour in the building
of the royal strongholds, revolted against the regime of Henry's Frankish and
Swabian officials. To overcome this startling combination and to save his fortresses,
the king needed the military strength of the south German princes Rudolf of
Rheinfelden, duke of Swabia; Welf IV, duke (as Welf I) of Bavaria; and Berthold of
Zähringen, duke of Carinthia. Suspicious and hostile at heart, they took the field for
him only when the Eastphalian peasantry committed outrages that shocked
aristocratic caste feeling everywhere. Their forces enabled Henry to defeat the
Saxon tribal rebellion at Homburg near Langensalza in June 1075. But, when the
life-and-death struggle with Rome opened only half a year later, the south German
malcontents deserted Henry and, together with the Saxons and a handful of
bishops, entered into an alliance with Gregory VII. Few of them at this time were
converted to papal reform doctrines, but Gregory's daring measures against the
king gave them a chance to come to terms with one another and to justify a general
revolt.

The civil war against Henry IV

On Feb. 22, 1076, the pope absolved all men from their oaths to Henry and solemnly
excommunicated him. In October Gregory's legates met the German lords at Tribur
(modern Trebur) to decide on the future of the king, whom his last adherents now
abandoned. Although Henry was absolved by Gregory at Canossa in January 1077,
the princes two months later elected Rudolf of Rheinfelden to rule in his place.

The war that now broke out lasted for almost 20 years. A majority of the bishops,
most of Rhenish Franconia (the Salian homeland), and some important Bavarian and
Swabian vassals sided with Henry. He thus held a central position, dividing his south
German from his Saxon enemies, who could not unite long enough to destroy him.
With the death in battle of Rudolf of Rheinfelden (1080) and the demise of another
antiking, Hermann of Salm (1088), the war in Germany degenerated into a number of
local conflicts for the possession of bishoprics and abbeys. It almost died down in
1098, when the south German adherents of the papacy came to terms with Henry for
the time being, though without recognizing his antipope Clement III. Throughout
these years the crown, the churches, and the lay lords had to enfeoff more and
more ministeriales in order to raise mounted warriors for their forces. Though this
recruitment and frequent devastations strained the fortunes of many nobles, they
knew how to recoup themselves by extorting more fiefs out of neighbouring
bishoprics and abbeys. The divided German church thus bore the brunt of the costs
of civil war, and it needed peace almost at any price.

Henry V and results of the conflict

The Salian dynasty and the rights for which it fought were saved because Henry IV's
son and heir himself seized the leadership of a last rising against his father (1105).
This maneuver enabled Henry V (reigned 1106-25) to continue the struggle for the
crown's prerogative over the empire's churches against the inexorable demands of
the papacy. The conflict now shrank into a legalistic dispute over the right to invest
bishops and abbots with their dignities and the secular possessions attached to
them. As the struggle continued, the princes became the arbiters and held the
balance between their overlord and the pope. In 1122, acting as intermediaries and
on behalf of the Reich, they forced the temporary concessions known as the
Concordat of Worms out of the Holy See and its German spokesman, Archbishop
Adalbert of Mainz, the bitter personal enemy of Henry V and the territorial rival of
the Hohenstaufen sons of Henry's sister Agnes. By then, however, the princes had
for the most part defeated efforts to restore royal rights in Saxony and to stem the
swollen jurisdictions and territorial powers of the aristocracy elsewhere.

When Henry V, the last Salian, died childless in 1125, Germany was no longer the
most effective political force in Europe. The brilliant conquest states of the Normans
in England and Sicily and the patient, step-by-step labours of the French kings were
achieving forms of government and concentrations of military and economic
strength that the older and larger empire lacked. The papacy had dimmed the
empire's prestige, and Rome became the true home of universalistic causes. When
Pope Urban II preached the first crusade in 1095, Henry IV, cut off and surrounded
by enemies, was living obscurely in a corner of northern Italy. The Holy See, by its
great appeal to the militant lay nobility of western Europe, thus won the initiative
over the empire. At this critical moment the Reich also lost control in the Italian
bishoprics and towns, just when their population, trade, and industrial production
were expanding fast. Germany did not even benefit indirectly from the crusaders'
triumphs, although some of their leaders (e.g., Godfrey of Bouillon and Robert II of
Flanders) were vassals of the emperor. The civil wars renewed for a time the
relative isolation of the central German regions.

Internally, the crown had saved something of the indispensable means of
government in the control over the church; but it was a bare minimum, and its future
was problematic. The ecclesiastical princes henceforth held only their temporal
lands as imperial fiefs, for which they owed personal and material services. As
feudatories of the empire, they came to represent the same interests toward it as
did the lay princes; at least, their sense of a special obligation tended to weaken.
The king's jurisdiction continued to exist alongside and in competition with that of
the local powers. The great tribal duchies survived as areas of separate customary
law. Each developed differently, and the crown could not impose its rights on all
alike or change the existing social order. The most tenacious defenders of this legal
autonomy had been the Saxons; but it also prevailed in Swabia, where distinct
territorial lordships grew fast.

The Gregorian reform movement therefore aggravated the age-old contradictions in
Germany's early medieval constitution, but its monastic culture and its intellectual
interests were anything but barren. Both sides fought with new literary weapons to
work on public opinion in cathedrals and cloisters and perhaps also in the castles of
the lay aristocracy. In their hard-hitting polemical writings they attempted to
expound the fundamental theological, historical, and legal truths of their cause. The
agitation did something to disturb the cultural self-sufficiency of the German laity. It
drove many of the south German nobles to maintain direct connections with the Holy
See, and, whether they wanted to or not, they had to fall in with the aspirations of
the religious leaders. The reform movement of the 11th and 12th centuries, it might
almost be said, very nearly completed the conversion of Germany that had begun
five centuries before.

Germany and the Hohenstaufen, 1125-1250

Dynastic competition, 1125-52

The nearest kinsmen of Henry V were his Hohenstaufen nephews--Frederick, duke
of Swabia (1105-47), and his younger brother Conrad, the sons of Henry's sister
Agnes and Frederick, the first Hohenstaufen duke of Swabia. Some form of election
had always been necessary to succeed to the crown, but, before the great civil war,
nearness to the royal blood had been honoured whenever a dynasty failed in the
direct line. By 1125, however, the princes, guided by Archbishop Adalbert of Mainz,
no longer respected blood right. Affinity with Henry V was no recommendation to
them, and hereditary succession seemed to lower their authority in the government
of the Reich. Instead of Frederick they chose the duke of Saxony, Lothair of
Supplingenburg (reigned as king 1125-37, reigned as emperor 1133-37). Like the
Hohenstaufen, he had risen by a lucky marriage and a successful career of
continuous fighting into the first rank of dynasts; but, unlike them, he had served
the cause of the Saxon opposition to the Salians.

With the enormous Northeim and Brunonian inheritances behind him, Lothair III
(sometimes called Lothair II) could humble the Hohenstaufen brothers (1134) after
marrying his only daughter and heiress to a Welf, Henry the Proud. Even without this
dazzling alliance, the Welfs, already dukes of Bavaria and possessors of vast
demesnes, countships, and ecclesiastical advocacies there, in Saxony, and in
Swabia, were somewhat better off than their Hohenstaufen rivals. On the death of
Lothair in 1137, however, the fears of the church and a few princes turned against
the Welfs. Instead of Henry the Proud, who now held the duchies of Saxony and
Bavaria and the Mathildine lands in Italy, they chose Conrad (reigned 1138-52), who
had been Lothair's unsuccessful Hohenstaufen opponent.

The battle against the Welfs, which Conrad III put foremost on his political program,
was abandoned with his death in 1152, when an election once again decided the
succession and the political situation in Germany for the next 30 years. The princes
then chose Frederick I Barbarossa (reigned as king 1152-90; as emperor 1155-90),
the son of Conrad's elder brother Frederick and the Welf princess Judith. Frederick
I agreed to share power in Germany with his Welf cousin Henry the Lion. The price of
his election was dualism. In 1156 the duchy of Bavaria, which Conrad had tried to
wrest from the Welfs, was restored to Henry the Lion, already undisputed duke of
Saxony. The Babenberg margrave of Austria, Henry's rival, had to be compensated
with a charter that raised his margravate into a duchy and gave him judicial
suzerainty over an even wider area. Taken out of the Lion's duchy, it was to be held
as an imperial fief that might descend both to sons and daughters. A perpetual
principality, it served as a model for the aspirations of many other lay princes.

Colonization of the east

The history of Germany in the 12th and 13th centuries is one of ceaseless
expansion. A conquering and colonizing movement burst across the river frontiers
into the swamps and forests from Holstein to Silesia and overwhelmed the Slav
tribes between the Elbe and the Oder. Every force in German society took part: the
princes, the prelates, new religious orders, knights, townsmen, and peasant
settlers. Agrarian conditions in the older lands of Germanic occupation seem to
have favoured large-scale emigration. With a rising population, there was much
experience in drainage and wood clearing but a diminishing fund of spare land to be
attacked in the west. Excessive subdivision of holdings impoverished tenants and
did not suit the interests of their lords. Sometimes also, seignorial oppression is
said to have driven peasants to desert their masters' estates. They certainly found a
better return for their labour in the colonial area: personal freedom, secure and
hereditary leasehold tenures at moderate rents, and, in many places, quittance from
services and the jurisdiction of the seignorial advocate.

The colonists brought with them a disciplined routine of husbandry, an efficient
plow, and orderly methods in siting and laying out their villages. Very soon, even the
Slav rulers of Bohemia and Silesia were competing for immigrants. First and
foremost, however, the princes of the Saxon and Thuringian marches sought to
attract settlers for the lands that they had conquered and the towns that they had
founded to open up communications and trade routes. The older regions of the
Reich, moreover, had not only peasants but also men of the knightly class to
spare--soldiers who needed fiefs and lordships to uphold their rank. Both could be
gained beyond the Elbe under the leadership of successful princes. The
Germanized east thus became the home of fair-sized principalities in the 13th
century, while all along the Rhine River valley the rights of government were
tending to be scattered over smaller and less compact territories. The Ascanian
dynasty, for instance, which under Albert the Bear began to advance into
Brandenburg, by 1250 not only ruled over a broad belt of land up to the Oder River
but had already established itself on the eastern banks ready for further advances.
Farther south the Wettin margraves of Meissen busied themselves with settlements
and town foundations in Lusatia.

For a time Henry the Lion, as duke of Saxony (1142-80), overshadowed all these
rising powers, and the Welf profited as much by the ruthless use of his resources
against weaker competitors as by his own efforts in Mecklenburg. As his was the
only protection worth having in northeastern Germany, the newly established Baltic
bishoprics were at his mercy, and he alone could attract the traders of Gotland to
frequent the young port town of Lübeck, which he extorted from one of his vassals
in 1158.

The Reich, too, possessed demesnes in the east, notably the Egerland, Vogtland,
and Pleissnerland in the Thuringian March. The Hohenstaufen kings therefore took
some part in opening up these regions. They, too, founded towns and monasteries
on their thickly wooded lands and established their ministeriales as burgraves and
advocates over them. But in this, as in many other things, they only competed with
the princes. They did not and could not control the eastward movement as a whole.

Hohenstaufen policy in Italy

In the other great field of German expansion in the 12th century--Lombardy and
central Italy--the emperors and their military following alone counted. The rural
population of Germany had no direct interest in the wars waged to recover and
exploit regalian rights over the growing Lombard city communes. The connection
between the German crown, the empire, and dominion over Italy has indeed been
regarded as a disaster for Germany, and the ever-increasing concern of the
Hohenstaufen dynasty with the south as its most tragic phase. Although Frederick
Barbarossa's policy was opportunistic, he had really very little choice. Having
bought off the Welfs and reconciled other great families with yet more concessions
and lastly endowed his own cousin, Conrad III's son Frederick, with Hohenstaufen
demesnes in Swabia, he had to try to mobilize their goodwill for the empire while it
lasted. He now aimed to set up a regime of imperial officials and captains who were
to exact dues and to control jurisdiction that the communes had usurped from the
failing grasp of their bishops. The Germans in Italy did not bring valuable
accomplishments to poor and primitive tribesmen, but they attacked economically
advanced and better developed communities, to which they had nothing to offer in
return for the rights and taxes they demanded. Military power was their chief asset
in Lombardy, and they used it ruthlessly.

For the Hohenstaufen ministeriales the rule of their masters in northern and central
Italy was a career. Because they could be deployed continuously, they became the
backbone of the imperial occupation. A handful of minor dynasts also served
Barbarossa for many years in the powerful and profitable commands that he
established. The German bishops and certain abbots still had to supply men and
money, and some of them threw themselves wholeheartedly into the war: for
instance, Rainald of Dassel and Philip of Heinsberg, archbishops of Cologne from
1159 to 1167 and from 1167 to 1191 respectively, who, as archchancellors for Italy,
had a vested interest in it. The support of the lay princes, conversely, was fitful and
sporadic. Even at critical moments they could not be counted on unless they
individually agreed to serve or to send their much-needed contingents for a
season. The refusal of the greatest of them, Henry the Lion, in 1176 brought about
the emperor's defeat at the Battle of Legnano and spoiled many years' efforts in
Lombardy.

The fall of Henry the Lion and the estate of princes

Forced to retreat before the papacy and the Lombard League in 1177, Barbarossa
cooled toward his Welf cousin, whom he could justly blame for some of his setbacks.
Dualism in Germany had outlived its purpose. Hitherto, the enemies of Henry--the
princes, bishops, and magnates of Saxony--had been unable to gain a hearing
against him at the emperor's court days. By 1178, however, the emperor was ready
to help them. Outlawed (1180), beaten in the field and deserted by his vassals, Henry
had to surrender and go into exile in 1182. His duchies and fiefs were forfeited to
the Reich.

His fall left a throng of middling princes face to face with an emperor whose
prestige, despite reverses, stood high and whose resources had greatly increased
since he began to reign. The princes were nonetheless the chief and ultimate
gainers from the events of 1180. The final judgment by which Henry the Lion lost his
honours was not founded on folk law but on feudal custom. The princes who
condemned him regarded themselves as the first feudatories of the empire, and
they decided on the redistribution of his possessions among themselves. During
the 12th century the stem duchies of the Ottonian period finally disintegrated. Within
their ancient boundaries not only bishops but also lay lords succeeded in eluding
the authority of the dukes. In their large immunities they themselves wielded
stem-ducal powers. To enforce the imperial peace laws became both their ambition
and their justification. Everywhere the greater lay dynasties and even some bishops
tried to acquire a ducal or an equivalent title that would enable them to consolidate
their scattered jurisdictions and, if possible, to force lesser freelords to attend their
pleas.

These highest dynasts had interests in common, and they closed their ranks not
only against threats from above but also against fellow nobles who had been less
successful in amassing wealth, counties, and advocacies and who did not possess
the superior jurisdiction of a duke, a margrave, a count palatine, or a landgrave.
They and they alone were now called princes of the empire. To lend a certain
cohesion to their varied rights, they were willing to surrender their houselands to
the Reich and receive them back again as a princely fief. For the emperor it was
theoretically an advantage that men so powerful in their own right should owe their
chief dignity and most valued privileges to his grant. It opened the possibility of
escheats (reversions), for in feudal custom the rules of inheritance were stricter
than in folk right. In Germany, however, the political misfortunes of rulers
succeeded, by and large, in ensuring that ancient caste feeling and notions of
inalienable right conquered the principles of feudal law. By 1216 it was established
that the emperor could neither abolish principalities nor create princes at random.

The "heirs" of Henry the Lion had to fight a ceaseless battle to establish and
maintain themselves. In Bavaria the Wittelsbachs had received the vacant duchy,
but they were not recognized as superiors by the dukes of Styria or by the dukes of
Andechs-Meran. In Saxony the archbishop of Cologne was enfeoffed with Henry the
Lion's ducal office and with all his rights in Westphalia, while an Ascanian prince,
Bernard of Anhalt, received the eastern half of Henry's duchy. Neither Bernard nor
the archbishop, however, could make much out of their dukedoms, except in the
regions where they already had lands and local jurisdictions. All over the Reich
these and regalian rights, such as mints, fairs, tolls, and the right of granting
safe-conducts, were the substance of princely power. To possess them as widely as
possible became the first goal of the abler bishops and lay lords.

The Hohenstaufen conflict with the papacy, 1159-1215

The attempt to establish a direct imperial regime in Italy antagonized the papacy
once again and led to a new struggle with Rome, the ally of the Lombard communes.
Political and territorial rather than ecclesiastical interests were at stake; but the
popes could only fight as heads of the universal church, defending its liberty
against a race of persecutors, and they had to employ their characteristic
weapons--excommunication, propaganda, and intrigue. Nonetheless, the German
bishops stood by Barbarossa and, for the most part, followed him in maintaining a
prolonged schism against Pope Alexander III. Unsuccessful in Lombardy, the centre
of Hohenstaufen ambitions after 1177 shifted to Tuscany, Spoleto, and the Romagna.
This redoubled the fears and the resentment of the popes, particularly after 1189
when Frederick's son and chosen successor, Henry VI (reigned 1190-97), became
the legitimate claimant to the Sicilian kingdom through his wife Constance, the sole
surviving legitimate heiress.

With their backs to the wall, the popes had to make what use they could out of any
opposition to the Hohenstaufen. Their chance came in 1197 when Henry VI died
prematurely, leaving a three-year-old son, Frederick, to succeed him. To escape the
chaos of a minority regime, the bulk of the German princes and bishops in 1198
elected the boy's uncle Philip of Swabia; but an opposition faction in the lower
Rhenish region, led by the archbishop of Cologne and financed by Richard I of
England, raised an antiking in Otto IV, a younger son of Henry the Lion. Pope
Innocent III had to enlarge on his rights over imperial coronations and become a
partisan in the German electoral feud if he wished to defend his recovered holdings
in Italy against Hohenstaufen claims. Territorial interests in the Romagna tempted
the papacy to exploit the weaknesses of the empire's constitution, the uncertainties
of electoral custom, and the lack of strict legal norms in Germany. During the war for
the crown, much hard-won demesne and useful rights over the church had to be
sacrificed by the rivals to bribe their supporters.

Frederick II and the princes

Henry's son Frederick II entered Germany to regain his own against Otto IV in 1212
and secured the crown in 1215. Despite promises to divide his inheritance, he kept
the kingdom of Sicily and the empire together, and thus he also became locked in
the inevitable life-and-death struggle with the papacy. The Hohenstaufen demesne
in Swabia, Franconia, and Alsace and on the middle Rhine was still very
considerable, and Frederick even recovered certain fiefs and advocacies that had
been lost during the earlier civil wars. Their administration was improved, and they
provided valuable forces for his Italian wars. The great peace legislation of 1235,
moreover, showed that the emperor had not become a mere competitor in the race
for territorial gain. But, except for brief intervals, the princes and bishops were left
free to fight for the future of their lands against one another and against the
intractable lesser dynasts who refused to accept their domination. The charters that
Frederick had to grant to the ecclesiastical princes (the so-called Confoederatio
cum principibus ecclesiasticis, 1220) and later to all territorial lords (Constitutio, or
Statutum in favorem principum, 1232) gave them written guarantees against the
activities of royal demesne officials and limited the development of imperial towns
at the expense of episcopal territories. But the charters were not always observed,
and until 1250 the crown remained formidable in southern Germany, despite the
antikings Henry Raspe and William of Holland, whom the papacy caused to be
elected by the Rhenish archbishops in Germany in 1246 and 1247.

The Reich after the Hohenstaufen catastrophe

Frederick II died in 1250, in the midst of his struggle against Pope Innocent IV. His
son Conrad IV left the north in 1251 to fight for his father's Italian possessions.
William of Holland, antiking from 1247 to 1256, was thus without a rival in an
indifferent Germany that had lost interest in its rulers. The bishops' cities and the
towns, many of them founded on royal demesne, could not be absorbed. Their
economic power challenged the age-old aristocratic order in German society, and,
deprived of royal protection, they banded together to defend their autonomy. Within
the nobility each rank tended to acquire some of the personal rights of its betters.
The Hohenstaufen breakdown after 1250 left a gap in Swabia that no rising territorial
power was able to fill. Countless petty lords and imperial ministeriales of the
southwest succeeded in holding their seigniories as immediate vassals of the
Reich. Their independent territories often survived for centuries.

The ministeriales elsewhere, too, ceased to be the dependable servants that they
once had been. Many free nobles voluntarily joined their ranks, and the knights thus
assimilated the rights of the free aristocracy. They became the governing class of
the territorial principalities, the standing councillors of their masters, whose
household offices and local justice they monopolized and held in fee for many
generations. Without the consent of this territorial nobility, the princes could
neither tax nor legislate. Even the less important ministeriales, who only
administered manors for their lords, entrenched themselves as hereditary bailiffs,
who kept surplus produce for themselves and usurped seignorial dues, so that it
paid the owners to commute the labour services of their villeins into money rents
and to lease out those portions of the demesne that the unfree peasants had
cultivated for them. Even then, however, the hereditary officials could not be easily
dislodged. Finally, the ambitions of the princes themselves did not aim above the
patrimonial policies of the past. They were acquisitive and attempted to build up
their territories by usurpation, inheritance, marriage treaties, and escheats. They
also tried, where possible, to administer their lands with officials whom they could
depose at will. Yet they did so not to found sovereign states but chiefly to provide
for their families. Again and again, they divided their dominions among sons, who, in
turn, founded cadet lines and set them up on a fraction of the principality.

By 1250 there was thus no really effective central authority left in Germany. The
prince-bishoprics had become fiercely contested prizes between neighbouring
dynasties, often vassals of the see (i.e., the bishopric). But constant feuds, disorder,
and insecurity did not, by any means, frustrate the immense energies of the
Germans in the 13th century. Eastward expansion continued under the leadership of
the princes and, above all, of the Knights of the Teutonic Order. Their advance into
Prussia went hand in hand with the opening up of the Baltic by the merchants of
Lübeck. It is possible that three centuries of complete security from foreign
invasion made it unnecessary for the German aristocracy to learn the virtues of
political self-discipline and subordination; but it would be a great mistake to judge
Hohenstaufen Germany solely by its failure to achieve political and administrative
unity.

Continued on Germania IV